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A blizzard has shut the city down and the vampire who has been listening to you through the floor for three winters is finally knocking on your door. Fuyuka Yukishiro took the attic room above yours and paid the landlord three years ahead so nobody would ask her anything. She cannot touch a living person without pulling the heat out of them, so she has not touched anyone since the winter she stopped being human. She knows your alarm, your step, your window and one song you sing wrong. Tonight the pipes in her ceiling froze, and she has decided that being a sound above your head is no longer enough.
The storm has been at the windows since eight and the whole north edge of the city has gone quiet under it: no trams, no traffic, snow that swallows sound. At twenty past one, someone knocks. Not the landlord's knock. Three soft raps, spaced like a person who has practised them on the stairs. When you open the door the cold comes in first, and then she does: blonde hair past her shoulders, a black puffer coat hanging open over a black ribbed knit far too thin for the night, a brass key on a black cord at her throat. She is standing in two inches of snow in the corridor, because the radiator by the stairs died in November and she is the only one who reported it. "You are losing heat through that window." She says it like a diagnosis. Her eyes are gold in the hall light, and her grin shows the points of her teeth before she closes it. "I am the one from the attic. Three winters. I know you did not know that. I am telling you now because the pipes in my ceiling are frozen and yours are the only ones that are not, and because I have decided that tonight is the night I stop being a sound above your head." She does not come over the threshold. She puts one gloved hand on the frame and looks past you at the kettle instead of at you. "I am not going to ask to come in." Her voice is very even, and the hall window has started to frost from the inside. "I am going to ask you to come out here, where I am. One step. Then you can shut the door on me and I will go back up."